Geoff Calkins: Let personnel guys choose players for a change

The sentence was written by my colleague, Ronald Tillery, the only person in the universe who spends his entire working life covering the Memphis Grizzlies. Tillery did a story this past week about NBA prospects canceling their workouts with the team, even though the Grizzlies have three first-round picks.

Hasheem Thabeet refused to work out for the team last year. The Grizzlies drafted him anyway. Wrote Tillery: "There are indications that Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley wouldn't have insisted on picking the Tanzanian had he seen Thabeet's deficiencies up close and personal."

Feel free to weep, if you're a Grizzlies fan. Or upchuck, if you'd prefer.

The man who now calls the shots for the Grizzlies on personnel matters insisted on drafting a player he hadn't really seen.

Heisley can't spend his year scouting college players. He has a bazillion-dollar business to run. Small wonder he didn't know about Thabeet's deficiencies. But he picked him anyway. Because he liked Thabeet in theory. He liked the idea of drafting the next Dikembe Mutombo. Who wouldn't like that idea, honestly? But NBA teams don't draft ideas. They draft individual players with their own strengths and weaknesses -- strengths and weaknesses that are revealed over a full season of college games.

So now it turns out Thabeet looks more like the next Shawn Bradley than the next Mutombo. And the only defense for Heisley is that -- oopsie -- he had never seen him play up-close and personal. Which is actually more of an indictment than a defense, isn't it? Who would run an NBA franchise that way?

The Grizzlies would. The Grizzlies do.

Read today's story by Tillery if you feel like weeping/upchucking some more. In it, Tillery tries to explain exactly how the Grizzlies go about making their draft-night decisions. Next, maybe he can try to explain the public relations strategy of BP.

Heisley makes the decision with input from other people, a good number of whom don't actually work for the franchise. And some of Heisley's own people evidently don't have the courage to stand up to Heisley. Yes, Chris Wallace, this means you.

Wallace is supposed to be the general manager, of course. Heisley said he's giving Wallace a contract extension because "I feel he's done a decent job."

Talk about damning with faint praise. People are fired with nicer quotes than that.

But do you blame Wallace for shutting up and cashing his check? Do you blame anyone in the organization for not telling Heisley what he really needs to hear?

"Mr. Heisley, you're the owner so you can do whatever you want. But with all due respect, you have no idea which of these players to pick. You've never seen most of them play. You really should put one person in charge of making the pick and then, if that person screws it up, fire him and hire someone else."

There's no guarantee that one person wouldn't screw it up, either. When Jerry West was the one person, he picked Drew Gooden. Identifying which prospects will be dynamic pros is a hard job. But it's a lot harder if the guy doing the identifying hasn't actually seen the prospects play.

Who's to say if Xavier Henry will be better than Luke Babbitt? Or if Paul George will be better than Patrick Patterson?

I happen to like Avery Bradley and Epke Udoh. But you know what? I wouldn't let me make the picks. I'd let a professional personnel guy make the picks, someone who spends every waking moment thinking about this stuff.

The head coach can't do it because the head coach cares too much about the short term. West let Hubie Brown dictate the picks one year. The result: Troy Bell and Dahntay Jones.

So it has to be a personnel guy. Someone who will have a conviction about the players he has seen throughout the year. That's the other thing the Grizzlies lose by not empowering one personnel guy to make the final call: They make it hard for anyone to have a conviction, or for the organization to follow through on it.

Take last year, when there was a split heading into the draft. Tony Barone Jr. thought Stephen Curry would be great. Others at the table disagreed. So instead of one guy following his conviction about Curry, you had a stalemate. At which point it became easy to draft the big man. All things being equal, you always pick the big man, right? Except all things only became equal through a process that eliminated the possibility that one of the players might be great.

The same thing could easily happen this year. At least one player available when the Grizzlies pick Thursday night will turn out to be a fabulous pro. But there likely won't be agreement in the Grizzlies draft room as to the identity of that player. So instead of drafting for greatness, the temptation will be to draft for need. Instead of asking, "which of these players will be an All-Star?" the Grizzlies will wind up asking, "which of these roughly equivalent players best fits what we do?" Except, the players won't turn out to be roughly equivalent. Anymore than Thabeet is roughly equivalent to Curry or Tyreke Evans or, well, you get the idea.

The Grizzlies might well make three brilliant selections in Thursday's draft. Here's hoping they do. But the task would be easier if they left it up to someone who has actually seen the players play. We've seen how the alternative works, up close.

To reach Geoff Calkins, call 529-2364 or e-mail calkins@commercialappeal.com. Listen to him on "The Gary Parrish Show with Geoff Calkins," 4-6 p.m. weekdays, on WMFS (680 AM/92.9 FM).